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Comment by astoor | Hacker News Reader

The author believes "a Twitter where your popular tweets earn you money" would be a good thing? Twitter is already full of people trying to shout the loudest - how can adding a financial incentive to shout even louder make things better rather than worse?

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Because money is a different weighting scheme than costless engagement. Money weighted things behave differently than vote weighted things. Whether or not it will be better remains to be seen, but it should be interesting.

People willing to pay for quality content is always a good thing for content authors. By nature of their willingness to pay, it's a good thing for content consumers (otherwise they wouldn't do it).

Nobody requires anyone to use any website that they don't want to (except perhaps irs.gov). You are always free to ignore it, like you are free to ignore Twitter.

Giving people more options rarely makes the world worse.

Popularity is not quality, usually the inverse.

If people are willing to pay for it, the people consuming it find it valuable, which is frequently a proxy for quality (in the eyes of those consumers - the ones who count in this equation). Quality of content is, of course, subjective.

I have paid for Lady Gaga albums.

The quality problems often come from the poor proxy. Money being fungible means that the rich get higher weight in determining what's considered valuable. In this marketized system, who will value journalism - especially the kind that people in power need to hear, not what they want to hear. If the rich want to suppress a fact, they can buy fake news - and because price = value, the fake news becomes the new truth.

Quality of content is not quite "subjective" in general. Perhaps in entertainment.

Don’t confuse "being paid for your popular content" and "people paying actual money for your content". On Quora you get paid for your popular content even if nobody willingly gave you money: it’s just that the website is now full of ads and you get a small percentage of that.

Monetary value is not quality either.

Quality is of course subjective, but there are certainly examples of things which are popular and trashy, or cost lots of money and are not high quality, and even some examples of things which are popular and trashy and cost lots of money but are not high quality (Melania Trump's interior design comes to mind).

I just liked your comment. I accept ETH and BTC, thanks.

I just minted your comment as an NFT.

I just placed a bid on your NFT, to the moon!

I just copy-pasted your comment into notepad.exe

I’ve been hacked. All my comments are gone. This just sold out, please help me.

Youtube and Twitch already pay users so what does crypto add?

I believe the idea of Web3/Crypto is that it's decentralized, so there's no Google or Facebook to take a cut or control a narrative.

> I believe the idea of Web3/Crypto is that it's decentralized

Web3 is Centralized: https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/web3-centralized - discussed here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29766497

Even if it were decentralized, the moment a technology appears to be decentralized, we do everything in our power to add a centralized (management) layer on top (e.g. github). That layer is what the masses will flock to and eat the lunch of the original technology.

If you have a technology that is already centralized which you try to decentralize it will be nothing more than a niche existence (that might not be a bad thing. See centralized Twitter vs decentralized Mastodon as an example of this)

"Distribute", is more practical than "Decentralize" because it lets you articulate the players and don't have to worry about sybils.

The funniest thing right now is the noisy people into NFT "art" who get their work stolen and are appealing to authority in meatspace.

So-called Web3 applications are not pure Web3 - they have many centralized Web2 elements still present. The transition to Web3 will naturally happen incrementally, given it's an entirely new technological stack that has to be built out.

Also, there are benefits to even partial adoption of Web3 by applications. For example, providing a decentralized ownership graph gives the community more power to fork if the centralized server-provider abuses their power, for instance.

See what happened when Steem was seized by a billionaire to be made into a corporate appendage:

https://decrypt.co/38050/steem-steemit-tron-justin-sun-crypt...

Token ownership, that could not be censored by the new owner of the application, is what enabled this coordinated defection.

Is that really what's holding this idea back, though? Seems doubtful.

I could maybe buy the idea that we'll move to an internet where every site nickel and dimes us. But is it more likely for the world to adopt crypto or is it more likely for our Google and Facebook OAuth accounts to support a non-chain wallet api? The crypto cut seems like it will always be more expensive as well.

> Is that really what's holding this idea back, though?

I personally don't believe it is, but some people seem convinced. Also, there's a lot of money to be made for the early entrants who are promoting this idea.

So you're saying early adopters are paid off using late investors money? Is there a name for such a scheme?

Maybe 'reverse funnel system' could be appropriate.

But on a serious note, isn't this how everything works these days with inflated IPOs to reward venture capitalists?

I am assuming they pay users who have USD/EUR/GBP denominated accounts. Not sure how they go about paying in Vietnamese dong.

Looks like Twitch might be banned in Vietnam: https://twitter.com/freshminhtea/status/1083718396410097664?...

Its well tread territory considering they're global companies with store fronts and app stores for most countries. Moreover, I'm sure they handle more of the tax law than a crypto transaction would.

I am glad we are talking about crypto pro/cons but this article was a huge miss imho.

The arguments against are these beaten dead horses that many within crypto know already and frankly not well versed.

NFTs were an unenforceable joke, integrating the physical world and the digital world doesn't exist (yet?), there are alternatives to the PoW model in use, legal aspects and oracles in the Ethereum network need to be addressed still...what about the DAO reversing the hack which was essentially a loophole in the contract. When loopholes happen in current legal systems it's frowned upon and demands precedent. How about the ridiculous pump and dumps, the toxicity that is speculation amidst many other things.

Governments didn't pop up in one day whole cloth and this will take iterations as well. There is some evolutionary approach to things where what "theoretically works" is tested in reality and deduction is provn out against induction.

There is more transparency in some ways, a lot of confusion in regulation, and misinformation galore. Look no further than the current dealings in Wallstreet to see that existing systems are not currently solved with digital money having been tested for decades now.

I think there are many deserved "good, bad, and ugly" articles to be written but this one was lacking in depth, context, and what I feel is missing most frequently...contrast

> NFTs were an unenforceable joke

"NFT Art" is a stupid implementation of NFTs that probably mostly exists for money laundering.

I always thought of NFTs as a good backend for things like concert tickets or other kinds of "club memberships". This would not really have the enforceability problem, at least not more than traditional tickets, while some new features are added.

If there is no way to enforce the NFTs, then they are useless.

If someone is enforcing the NFTs then that someone could just as well store the data in some SQL table, since there is exactly 0 decentralisation in that case

There is also not really a way to enforce a physical concert ticket, but with a NFT, the owner can prove ownership and authenticity of the ticket (for example when re-selling a ticket), without relying on collaboration of the issuer of the ticket. The issuer can show that they created a fixed number of tickets and are not over-selling the event.

>The issuer can show that they created a fixed number of tickets and are not over-selling the event.

But there is no way to prove that the issuer is actually the person who "owns" the event. This all goes back to the oracle problem: Unless the proof exists on-chain (like the currency value of a public key), it is useless; there is still an "oracle" outside the chain that must provide the proof.

This is why NFTs are not useful.

I agree with you.

NFTs in their current hype cycle with art is a shallowly thought out implementation.

It requires a governing body to source the originals but then you essentially have a coin at this point.

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